Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/519

506 charms for me, as I wander under the shade of the trees. Then the wood-pigeons coo their notes of love, or sometimes take alarm, and their loud flapping flight is heard as they move to settle on some distant tree. I hear the wailing of the nightingale as I approach her nest,—one of those unmistakeable sounds which denote fear: “her wail resounds,” as Thomson notices, for he lived, and wrote, and died in the haunts of that bird. At a short distance the male pours forth his song, “more sweet than all,” with all its modulations and changes, in this leafy copse. It is, however, “when all the woods are still,” that his song is heard in all its beauty; for then he strains his little throat, as he answers a rival, with all the enthusiasm of love and jealousy. Sweet bird! how beautifully has the good Walton, in his charming pastoral, described “the doubling and redoubling of your voice and your sweet descant.”

But now I hear the wild cry of the green wood-pecker, who, as Mr. White of Selborne remarked, seems to laugh at all the world. The jay, with its harsh note, appears to give the alarm of approaching danger, for I see the rabbits scud towards their holes on hearing it. I like the jay, for he is not only a pretty but an affectionate bird, living lovingly in one family till the next breeding-season. They are, however, sadly persecuted by keepers—for what reason I know not. The jackdaw, that cunning bird, has, I see, a nest in a hole of that old and gnarled pollarded beech-tree, setting marauding boys at defiance. He is no great favourite of mine, though I like to hear his tenor when mixed with a flock of rooks, or when he caws on the projections of a church tower. In fact, I am sorry to say, he is a great thief. I would forgive him for pecking up the seeds of my French and broad-beans, and for other depredations in my garden, but he not only steals the eggs from the nests of my blackbirds and thrushes, but only yesterday he destroyed three half-grown young ones to feed his own brood, who, in time, will be as bad as himself.

See that little creeper (Certhia familiaris), how actively it runs over the rough bark of the trees, by means of its sharp claws and stiff tail-feathers,